Technology News

IBM warns of 'design rule explosion' beyond 22-nm

April 01, 2010 // R. Colin Johnson, EE Times.com

An IBM researcher warned of "design rule explosion" beyond the 22-nanometer node during a paper presentation at the International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD). Kevin Nowka, senior manager of VLSI Systems at the IBM Austin Research Lab, described the physical design challenges beyond the 22-nm node, emphasizing that sub-wavelength lithography has made silicon image fidelity a serious challenge.

"Simple technology abstractions that have worked for many generations
like rectangular shapes, Boolean design rules, and constant parameters
will not suffice to enable us to push designs to the ultimate levels of
performance," Nowka said.

Solving "design rule explosion," according to Nowka, involves
balancing area against image fidelity by considering the physical
design needs at appropriate levels of abstraction, such as within
cells. Nowka gave examples of how restricted design rules could reap a
three-fold improvement in variability with a small area penalty.

Nowka envisions physical design rules beyond the 22-nm node
that are more technology-aware and which make use of pre-analysis and
library optimization for improved density and robustness, he said.


Also at ISPD, which was held March 14 to 17 in San Francisco, Mentor
Graphics Corp. proposed that hardware/software co-design be used for
chips, their packages and their printed circuit (pc) boards. A Mentor
executive offered an example in which a 26 percent cost savings was
realized by performing such a co-optimization of all three systems
simultaneously.

"Thinking outside of the chip," was the key, according to John Park,
business development manager for Mentor's System Design division. By
optimizing the interconnect complexity among all three levels of a
design – chip, package and pc board – Park claimed that pin counts,
packaging costs and high speed I/O can be optimized.

According to Park, the chip-to-package-to-pc board design flow needs to be performed in parallel because restraints on pc boards often place requirements on
package design, while package requirements can in turn constrain chip
design, both of which are ignored by current designs flows.
Serge Leef, Mentor's vice president of new ventures and general manager
of the company's System-Level Engineering division, invited the
automotive industry to adopt the EDA design methodology for on-board
electronics.

According to Leef, the typical automobile today has up to 60 electronic
control units (ECUs), up to 10 different data networks, several
megabytes of memory and miles of wiring—all of which could be better
designed by EDA-like software.

"Software components are like VLSI macros and standard cells; ECUs are
like physical areas on the layout onto which IC blocks are mapped;
signal-to-frame mapping is like wire routing," said Leef.

New software tools are needed, according to Leef, which can
copy the EDA methodology but be optimized for solving the simultaneous
conflicting constraints in automotive electronics, permitting analysis
and optimization of designs in order to reduce the number of test cars
that have to be prototyped.

In perhaps the boldest presentation at ISPD, keynote speaker
Louis Scheffer, a former Cadence Design Systems Inc. Fellow who is now
at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, proposed adapting EDA tools to
model the human brain. Scheffer described the similarities and
differences between the functions of VLSI circuitry and biological
neural networks, pointing out that the brain is like a smart sensor
network with both analog and digital behaviors that can be modeled with
EDA.

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